I should start by saying I am shocked rest of joke blah blah blah Trump’s a disloyal asshole. No one is shocked that Trump doesn’t actually stand by his friends, or that he doesn’t reward loyalty. The guy’s built a career on not honoring his contracts with vendors, and not giving a shit about his investors. He can’t even be faithful to the idea of business in that he just keeps losing money. He will never do anything that doesn’t personally enrich him, and will never take responsibility for things that go poorly.

But again, no one is shocked.

What is surprising is that anyone in Congress believes that Trump is an asset. What’s even more surprising is the comic justice that explains why Paul Ryan still clings to Trump as though Trump will do anything other than drag Ryan’s ass down in the polls and through the general public. But let’s start with a basic fact: Ryan will never, under any circumstance, criticize the President or his family. He will be complacent. He’ll spout nonsense about getting to the bottom of things, but will not have the basic human decency to state on record that campaign officials should not gather opposition research from adversarial foreign governments. It was the bad, bad Russians who tricked Donnie J into all of those things, but also President Trump meeting alone with Putin is fine because Putin isn’t one of those bad, bad Russians I mentioned earlier in this sentence. OK.

And Ryan will continue to support Trump regardless of his administration’s actions, because Ryan is playing the same shitty math games Trump is. You might remember that a few days ago, the President of the United States framed his health care bill’s failure as an “impressive” vote, considering they got forty-eight out of fifty-two “people” to vote for it. Which is super cool because the other forty-eight members of the Senate are apparently fictional or some sort of miscellaneous humanoids. The mindset that getting a majority of Republican votes is all that matters is the reason that Ryan will push through a bill his own constituents don’t want. Ryan, along with most of the Republican party, have spent so many years tracking right to reach “their base” that they’ve forgotten that regularly working with Democrats is a thing they’re supposed to be doing. Ryan can’t bail on Trump no matter how bad Trump’s numbers get because Ryan’s only playing with half the stack. It’s why Ryan can reasonably believe a Breitbart story that tells him his popularity is dipping in his district because Ryan’s healthcare bill isn’t severe enough.

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And all of this is built on the presumption that sticking with Trump, and therefore the thirty-six percent of the country who still support Trump, will eventually payoff. Eventually, Ryan will be able to suck up to enough people and degrade enough standards that they’ll be able to repeal the ACA, gut Medicaid, and give tax cuts to billionaires. They have to, right? After all, thirty-six percent is most of fifty, right?

We can ridicule Chris Christie for being a sell out all we want (and that’s in no way to discourage people from doing so. Fuck that guy), but at least Christie knows he’s got nothing left to lose. Ryan’s a sell out because he’s a fucking idiot.